User:Heathart/sandbox/draftbltmidpointreport

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learning from the grantee's first 3 months.

Summary

Felton Kizer, Amanda Harth, and Peter Anastos at MCA Chicago edit-a-thon photobooth run by Ireashia Bennett

• We hosted our first events off the continent!
• We've developed our photo initiative which has been productive (and fun!)
• We are cultivating sustainable partnerships with cultural and civic institutions
• We applied to be an official Wiki affiliated User Group !

Methods and activities

Setup

• Ongoing Meetup Page - We continue to organize and document through our Meetup Page on Wikipedia.
• User Group - We have applied to be an official Wikimedia affiliated User Group.
• Monthly online BLT Meeting of core team members

Research & Development

• Studied what demographic and geographical areas are underrepresented in our scope.
• Created goals for tracking new users, assistance and outreach
• Planned and produced events, campaigns and outreach
• Connected our coder and metadata assistant to Wikimedia via WikiCon North America

Project Outreach & Growth

• Cultivating partnerships with cultural institutions to support & host Wiki events
• Continuing partnerships with local Wiki chapters (WikiNYC & Chicago Wikipedians)
• Ran recruitment campaigns and interviews for Project Manager and Proxies.
• Authoring an essay for the Wikipedia @20 book to be published through MIT Press 2019
• Authoring another essay for a book on Art & Ed to be published 2019
• BLT's work has received media praise from numerous other media outlets including NowThis! and Art21 Magazine

Midpoint outcomes

Artist Simone Leigh by photographer Tiffiany I. Smith submitted for our Juneteenth Photo Challenge

Artist Okechukwu Okegrass Ofiaeli at Southeast Queens Library editathon photobooth by photographer Kearra Gopee.

Metrics

• BLT participated in 34 events, 28 of those were hosted by us.
• Engaged 154 editors
• Trained 74 new editors
• Monthly Meetup in which we’ve engaged 20 users with online training
• 167 new articles begun.
• 896 existing articles edited.
• 589 images uploaded

Artist Sajda Musawwir Ladner at BLT photobooth pop up by photographer Imara Moore.

Cultural worker and Schomburg resident, Denisse Andrade, at BLT event photobooth at Schomburg Center for Black Culture by photographer Andrea Cauthen.

Photo Campaigns + WikiCommons

• BLT Photo Booth
  • Most of our events feature a photo booth, offering professional photography for artists on our task list who are missing images on their Wikipedia pages.
  • We worked with professional Black women photographers Kearra Gopee, Imara Moore, Ireashia Bennet, Tiffany I. Smith, Zalika Azim and Andrea Cauthen to run our photo booths that document artists with Wikipedia articles missing images.
  • These pop-up events educate the public about Wikipedia, by creating a space to document people with Wikipedia pages and no photos, in a space where they don’t need to commit their time as an editor.
• Academic campaign empowering photo students to document historical figures
  • Identifying articles missing images (living Black artists)
  • Preemptively contacting these notable artists to gauge their interest and match-make with student and photographer
  • Training students and photographers on how to upload their photos and add them to Wikipedia pages educates them on using WikiCommons and inspires continuing contribution to Wiki.
• Social media campaign coordinated contributions and education remotely.
  • We used hashtags to educate the public on the lack of visibility of Black artists in Wikimedia.
    • Began #WikiSeesBlack
    • Participated in #VisibleWikiWomen
  • Photo Challenge (our first!) competition to upload the best photo of a Black artist during the challenge period (determined by crowd-sourced voting)

Highlights

• Our mission is based in contributing to the creation of a more equitable Wikipedia. We have considered how our project translates between languages and cultures, both literally and in response to different cultural priorities or gaps in knowledge.
  • We hosted our first overseas events in Jamaica, Cape Town and Johannesburg.
  • We have been evaluating how our methods translate to different cultures.
  • Responsible linguistic translation means more than simply creating a direct translation, but must involve a nuanced understanding of language, culture, and history.
  • We edited English, Spanish, Jamaican Patois, French, Burmese and isiZulu Wikipedias.
    • New articles included Kagiso Patrick Mautloa, Candida Alvarez, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Ayanna Jolivet McCloud, Marisa Williamson, Margaret Rose Vendryes and Monstah Black.

Finances

• We expected to have spent more of the funds for the Project Manager and Proxie roles by now. These positions have proven challenging to fill, so we have not spent that yet and plan to increase the hours for those positions in the spring to make up for that.

Learning

Challenges we've faced...

• Hiring Project Manager - finding the people with Wiki experience and the right fit for our project has been challenging. Therefore the Lead Organizers have taken up this work and therefore have been spread quite thin. The amount of information about organizing Wiki projects and the wide variety of locations where that info lives is dense and we really need to delegation of all that to one person, the Project Manager. We are currently shifting focus to both targeting experienced editors to recruit and looking for organizers who fit with our project that might be willing to do the work in becoming new Wiki editors so they can be up to speed with what the project needs. Most of our goals are dependent on finding this hire and them helping to strategize reaching those goals.
• Hiring Regional Proxies - finding committed editors who want to organize in different cities has proven more challenging than expected. We have hired one of our editors who is more nomadic than we wanted for a regional proxy to organize in Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago, her hometowns. We have discovered that some of our more committed editors are not comfortable as organizers, or in the spotlight, so finding an organizer who fits our project might be better if they are willing to put in editing hours and train, but this would be a longer process. We are currently working on researching and recruiting existing editors who may not know about our project search.
• Attendance - We are finding it challenging, at times, to get editors to attend. Often we have verbal confirmation and excitement from editors who don't show up. We have found that working with a host institution with an existing public works best, so we are investing time in relationships with institutions and repeat events. We still believe it is important to think creatively to help Wikimedia be more accessible. So we have also been discussing the idea of a public relations campaign, and have been trying to think creatively about equity and incentives, but want to save these kinds of decisions until we have hired our Project Manager.
• Assessment - A more thorough study of our outcomes and editors would be useful. We know tools exist, but navigating them has been challenging. We are beginning to to experiment with surveys and more creative forms of feedback. We plan to organize this better with the new Project Manager.

What is working well...

• Learning pattern: Support a Community of Photographers
• Learning pattern: Child Room

Next steps and opportunities

• HIRING. Project Manager + 2 more Regional Proxies
• Connecting with the Foundation for advice about tools and strategies after we have hired a Project Manager.
• Strategizing outreach, use of tools, talk page tags, mailing lists etc with Project Manager.
• Expanding our project into an annual effort and applying for an Annual Plan Grant!

Grantee reflection

• The independence we have is both welcomed and intimidating. We have folks ready to give us advice as we move forward, but we need to hire a Project Manager before we are ready for that.
• Loved the Bootcamp in DC that we attended but really need hackathon space within something like that where we can actually put some tools into practice with one-on-one attention. Having an opportunity like this for grantees in some form would be great, even if it were online. And organizing meet-ups (online) for current grantees would be useful too, just to touch base with each other and share skills and stories.
• We have been surprised at the difficulty in finding hires!
• We have been thrilled with the public's support of our project and the reassurance that we are filling a much needed space in the Wikimedia world.

"Authoring the dominant historical account means determining who are Others and the terms by which they are treated as such." - Heather Hart and Jina Valentine, co-founders, Black Lunch Table.